By Emily Stonehouse

There are a lot of buzz words circulating around the veins of our world these days. It’s no secret that we are in an era of political strife; a marked delineation of right and wrong, true or false.

It seems that many are on edge; pushed to their limits of reason and logic. Clinging to any scraps of structure they can muster.

And in this current climate, the grey area of lying in the limbo of fight or flight, the safety zone seems to be in the chaos of conflict.

It’s comfortable. It’s what we know. It’s what we understand. For people who have lived through traumas, it’s been proven that they carry that into their every day, even during moments of relative peace. It’s comfortable. It’s what they know. It’s what they understand.

If they’re always living in constant conflict, it leaves no room to expose the softness of their bellies; the place they can get jabbed again when they finally let their guard down.

And the roots of these conflicts are spun around the buzz word ‘misunderstanding’.

It’s an easy band-aid to an open wound of uncertainty. We blame it on the gaps we need to fill, on the voids that span between the political polarizations, on the dots we crave to connect.

As I sat in the sticky-hot room of the Haliburton Legion on Sunday afternoon, watching a presentation by the newly-formed group Citizens of Crown Land Protection, who rallied in an effort to oppose conservation by the Haliburton Highlands Land Trust, ‘misinformation’ ricocheted off the walls.

It was a term used by one individual in the crowd. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” she said.

“But who decides what’s ‘misinformation’ and what’s truth?” asked another.

It was a good question. Who decides what’s right or wrong, true or false.

We are deeply set in our own beliefs. The ones embedded into our core from our inception. Who we vote for, who we learn from, who we love.

It’s hard to branch out past those roots that have coiled so deeply around our core, our very being.

In that sticky-hot room, there were some good questions, some valid concerns. There were also smatterings of notably falsified information spewed out. Information that I would insist anyone who heard it, to dive deeper. To ask questions. To push beyond the face-value of the statement and dig into the roots.

We put trust into certain people in this world. Doctors, scientists, seasoned professionals.

But the firm line of fact versus fiction is not set in stone. It wobbles and waves with the energy of a river; pulsing along its edges, bubbling and boiling with the seasons.

As we live in this existence of uncertainty, of conflict, of strife, I urge you to dig deeper. Facts have wiggle room, fiction has an audience.

We are on the cusp of yet another election, this time at a federal level. We may be in this world of discomfort for the foreseeable future, but there are opportunities to carve your own path, to challenge what you know to be right, to stand up for those whose voices are muted.

Misinformation is whatever you choose it to be. A label you can stamp in an effort to connect the dots. But information exists out there; somewhere in the void.

And suddenly, maybe it’s our chance to learn.